New Game on the Block #2: Slither.io

Slither.io is a new browser game similar to that of Agar.io.  It is a game where you try to become the largest snake on the server and continue to grow as large as possible.  However, this can become difficult because other individuals will be trying to kill you in order to steal you life force and grow larger themselves.  It's an extremely enticing and addictive game for a free browser game and I highly recommend that you try it.  That being said, let's go over the specifics of Slither.io!

Your lowly beginnings

 

When you get to the start screen of Slither.io you will see that you may pick a nickname and then start the game.  There are also several share buttons on the bottom right corner for twitter and facebook as well as a youtube subscribe button on the top left of the page.  Once you type in your nickname hitting the play button will throw you into a game server and you can begin playing.  Once you begin you will see your snake slithering off in some random direction and lots of little orbs of light that are around your character.  You control your snake with the mouse and the best way to begin is to start collecting the small little orbs that you see around yourself.  You can "dart" by clicking the left mouse button but be careful as you will lose size based on how long you hold the button for.  You will see the size that you are in the bottom left corner, the minimap in the bottom right corner and a leaderboard in the top left corner of the screen.  A key thing to remember when you begin and you are around the size of 100 - 1000 it's always easier to die and rebuild to these points so you can play A TON more aggressively than you would if you were at more of a size like 20,000.

Low Score Strategies

The main strategies that are used when you first begin is to either kill , scavenge or a combination of the two.

The Killing Strategy

 

The killing strategy involves finding anyone and killing them for their life force.  This involves darting in front of their head and making them run into your side.  If it works you'll be able to grow tremendously faster than you normally would if you just picked up the naturally spawning orbs in the game.  However their is a strong likelihood that the person you are trying to kill will kill you instead or you'll just miss entirely and move on with your slithering life.

The Scavenging Strategy

 The Scavenging strategy involves going around the map and collecting the sustenance of other people's kills.  This is a very good strategy if you want to survive for the long term.  The best way to implement this strategy is to head to the middle of the map where there is the largest amount of people and wait for someone to die.  Once that happens steal the sustenance from other players before they can get there and make sure that you don't get killed in the feeding frenzy as many other people will be trying to do the same thing.  In fact, this is a good way to get even more glowing orbs.

The Scavenge-Kill Strategy

This strategy combines the scavenging tactic with the killing tactic in order to gain leaps and bounds into the game.  This strategy entails waiting for someone to die and stealing the orbs from other people.  However if there is a large amount of orbs in the vicinity from the death of a large snake, you can use this to your advantage.  Most likely what will happen is a feeding frenzy will occur and this is where you will strike.  Be very cautious when taking the orbs and DO NOT DART to get as much as possible, this is very key in baiting people in and keeping yourself from getting killed too.  If you miss some orbs just move on and forget about it you don't want to get greedy and get yourself killed.  When you see someone darting in being greedy and trying to steal the orbs that you are getting wait until they get close to you and then dart right in front of their head and kill them.  Once you have done that repeat the process until someone else does the same thing.  The great thing about this strategy is that it is a cyclical strategy.  You take orbs, wait for someone to be greedy, kill them, take the orbs, wait for another person, kill them and on and on until you are too large to conduct this strategy any longer.  You can do this all the way up until you start hitting the 10,000 mark and then different strategies start coming into play.

The Mid Score and Large Score Strategies

  These strategies will mainly be for when you reach a score that is between 5,000 and above.

The Wrapping Strategy

This strategy involves using your length to your advantage.  In order to keep growing adequately enough, you have to keep gaining orbs that are gotten from killing other players in the game.  This strategy involves finding someone that is smaller than you and wrapping them up to make it inescapable for them.  You do this by circling them until you overlap yourself and once you do it will essentially be a guaranteed kill for yourself.  However there are several things that every player should keep in mind and that is that it is possible to escape from this trap.  One way to escape is if the player who has done the wrapping is not following their tail well enough and is cutting the circle to kill you faster, this is an opening for the trapped player to kill the trapper instead.  A different defensive strategy that the trapped person should conduct is to get as close to the trapper as much as possible and circle with them.  This way the person will have a hard time closing the circle more quickly and if they make a mistake (or get hit by some lag) then they will kill themselves.  Another thing to keep in mind too is that when you wrap a player you do not have to cut the circle more in order to kill the player faster.  The snake naturally closes the circle so you just have to keep yourself from being killed in order to attain a guaranteed kill.  The last thing that I want to say about this strategy is that it's great for the trapper when they trap someone but watch out for other people that will be using the same strategy and don't be afraid to let go of your target if you think you're being wrapped too.  I have seen several times how someone will have wrapped an individual and not be paying enough attention to realize that by doing so, they got themselves wrapped to by an even larger player than themselves.

Conclusion

These are many of the main strategies that can be found when you begin playing slither.io and there are tons more that I was not able to talk about in this post.  If you found this helpful please let me know and if you want more strategies like this don't be shy, let me know about this too!